Getting started with a talent marketplace development requires thorough analysis of existing solutions, and detailed planning of how your recruitment platform could stand out and become successful.  

Looking at giants like LinkedIn, with multiple add-ons, tools and features, one may get perplexed by a question: how can we compete with that?

However, when it comes to talent marketplace development, the right question you should answer is how your solution will enhance the onboarding experience both for job candidates and employers. For instance, the software could deal with the most problematic stages of HR processes in a particular industry in order to streamline them.

Outstanding talent marketplace features 

Besides the primary functionality of onboarding software, modern platforms implement additional features to provide the best possible user experience. Here are some of them.

• Transparency 
• let job candidates know about the employer's activity concerning their application, e.g. was it opened, was their profile viewed, when and how many times, etc.
• job offers should have the salary amount indicated: no need to spend time on the interviews when both the candidate and employer know that they don't match on this criteria beforehand. Moreover, writing “competitive salary” usually puts candidates off the job, when they could be suitable 
• Privacy: automatically blocking the current company from seeing the talent's profile    
• Inclusivity: removing the unconscious bias by blind assessment of applications with no access to the candidate's name, gender, and profile photo
• Individual career coaching and assistance with all stages of activity on a recruitment platform: from creating talent's profile to post-interview procedures 

Professional networking: creating active communities for specialists in different industries where they can ask for/give a piece of advice, share their experience or some professional updates, etc. This feature may also drive more talents to join the platform, providing employers with a bigger pool of job candidates.

Inverse job board for healthcare: Medimatch

Medimatch is a career platform that functions as a reverse healthcare talent marketplace. While, usually, a candidate would fill out an application and contact an employer, inverse job boards follow a different scenario. They provide a pool of professionals in a particular industry, and matching mechanisms to suggest qualified and the most suitable candidates for open vacancies. Then the employer contacts the talents who they would like to interview. 

Such an approach is beneficial and time-saving for both employers and job candidates. For employers it

• eliminates the chance of dealing with numerous irrelevant applications
• provides the list of most qualified professionals for the job opening 
• allows choosing and contacting only those candidates who suit the best.  

Job candidates, in their turn, are saved from the stressful and time-consuming process of searching different vacancies, filing the applications, and anticipation due to waiting for the responses. Instead, all they have to do is complete their profile at the recruitment platform, and get an interview invite should there be an open relevant vacancy.

Interview with Philip Braham, the founder of Medimatch

It's always priceless to learn about something from people who have lived through it. Medimatch founder Philip Braham has kindly shared his experience of healthcare talent marketplace development with us.

1. Hello, Philip! Could you, please, tell what has triggered an idea of the Medimatch concept?

I have been working in healthcare recruitment in the UK for 11 years, and successfully exited this business last year. I was very interested in technology, particularly in talent marketplaces, and checked out what people had done at services like hired.com, honeypot, triplebyte , and Vettery who exited for £100M.

I became curious about how we can scale up these recruitment platforms, and realised there was nothing in the UK from the healthcare talent market perspective. So I would be the one to bring the 1st healthcare talent marketplace to the UK healthcare!

2. What were your initial steps and things to consider to fully form an idea of the project?

I put together the ideas and started thinking about 

• how the platform would work
• what would be the target audience
• what was the opportunity available to us
• how big the market was
• where do we start, which jurisdictions: UK or can we start somewhere else
• demographics
• all other normal questions you would come up with when starting a business
• research with healthcare talent and employers to investigate the problems they face.

Then I needed to bring in some technical skills, and just started exploring and having conversations with people. Together with a friend of mine, who has a lot of technical experience, we mapped out more of the business, particularly, how it would work from a technical perspective. 

Then we raised our first pre-seed round, and now we are doing the business.

3. Can any talent join the platform, or are there any necessary qualifications that they should possess? If yes, what are they?

We are initially building a platform for nurses. It’s inclusive for any nurse, any qualifications, any background. We have plans to grow the platform to different areas of healthcare: to general practitioners (GPs), radiographers, physiotherapists, sonographers, etc. Our aim is to be #1 talent marketplace for healthcare professionals.

4. Can healthcare professionals be from any country in the world, or is the platform targeted only for some selected countries?

Initially, we're going to service the United Kingdom market with UK talent. Then we're going to service the UK market with international talent. Our further aim is to grow the platform to other countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Singapore, Middle East countries, trying to go global.

5.  How do you attract the top talent to Medimatch? 

We aim to build the largest talent community and grow our network through word of mouth and social media, e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp. Living by shared experiences is really important, so every nurse that signs up will join our community and bring 2-3 friends with them.

As we grow, we intend to advertise more to bring in talent who would usually search for open positions on job boards.

6. How do you check if the healthcare professional matches the company requirements and culture

We are building proprietary algorithms that will match candidates in minutes, not weeks, based on a number of desires and motivations.

7. Why did you decide to outsource your development needs? What do you value most in cooperation with a software development vendor? 

In case of a startup you take into consideration the cost of the build, especially for the minimal viable product (MVP). You get good value for money in other parts of the world. Rather than having a full-stack freelancer or a couple of developers in the UK, we can secure a larger development team of 6-7 professionals in Ukraine. Here in the UK there is a shortage of good talent available.

8. Do you have any specific plans regarding the further development of your platform, its functionality or its features?

   We have big plans, I don't want to give away too much. The matching of talents and open vacancies is the most important functionality at this stage. Later there will be a lot more different features to enhance the experience of clients, which are hospitals or healthcare providers, and candidates. We want Machine Learning to be a big part of this in the future.

   We want to 

   • make things with finding a job and recruitment in healthcare easier
   • make sure that we are the ones building the technology to make the experience of candidates and employers a lot better
   • make transactions quicker
   • provide the ability to recruit quicker
   • create a community on Medimatch for nurses, or any healthcare professionals
   • virtual events
   • physical events where we meet people
   • learning opportunities
   • creative element opportunities.

   We want Medimatch to become a central focus where healthcare professionals come and build their careers.

The answers we have got here certainly help to set correct business priorities and get a right start for a project. We thank Philip for his time and sharing this insightful information with us, and wish him to realize all his plans concerning enhancing healthcare talent onboarding!

If you have any questions or would like to share your own software development experience with us, get in touch!